Keep the feeds flowing

This came at a bit of an annoying time. For a long time, I wasn’t using Google Reader because I only followed a handful of blogs. I was just getting to my head that just having bookmarks to blogs was kind of annoying and going full steam ahead to using Google Reader instead was probably the right way to do things afterall. So the day when I decided to return to Google Reader, they’re all of sudden shutting down. Wonderful.

Sorry to contribute to the downfall. “Usage of Google Reader has declined”, it says. What’s the cause of the decline? Social media. Okay, that is something I can’t be blamed for, fortunately, so maybe Google Reader’s death wasn’t my personal fault entirely.

Here’s the thing: yeah, I keep posting my blog updates to Identi.ca and thusforth to Twitter. I may even post them elsewhere. But it’s a way of sharing links, not a way of letting people to read stuff. If people who follow me read the links, that’s cool, but I can’t expect everyone to follow me on Identi.ca and Twitter. Besides, you’ll just end up to the web page anyway.

For actually reading stuff, you want my RSS/Atom feeds. For reading stuff, you need handy applications like Google Reader. Oops - you need to probably say you want instead to return to the basics and just use a dedicated feed reader application.

Don’t give quarter to the social media sharing. It’s just a way of sharing stuff to a specific community - it’s not a tool for allowing people who are interested of reading your stuff to read your stuff. You don’t want to demand people to be part of your social circles. Keep your feeds up. You’ll need them. RSS and Atom are one of the backbones of the World Wide Web. They’re the tools that let you write stuff no matter what webhost you keep your blog on and what software you elect to use to blog. No one’s mandating anything to you.

I just installed Bamboo. There are others. Go grab them, go use them. You’ll need to.